---BDCN Business Model Short Description wrote:As a business, the Blam! Developer Communities Network (BDCN) manages the licensing rights to the Halo 1 source code as an intermediary between Microsoft's legal department and the developers, such as people from Gearbox Software, MacSoft, etc.
It also offers modders the ability to sell their mods to the player community.
With Microsoft, it is a partnership.
With developers, it is a licensing rights manager.
With modders, it is a central location to discuss ANYTHING about the game.
With players, it is a place to download mods for ANY Halo 1 platform, and to financially support mod teams and developers that they like.
I now ask the halo communities to combine into this single location.
The benefits include:
Free web-related resources, such as e-mail addresses, ftp accounts, etc.
Free migration from their old server to this new free server.
Everyone who was a community leader maintains their leadership and benefits from using the resources.
They maintain their history also of their existing sites by having their forums and wikis migrated by myself.
They could participate in all the features of the BDCN and turn their hobby into a little bit of money profit if they mod.
That's basically it in a nutshell.
The BDCN is where developers and modders and players can meet to discuss ways in which the Halo epic will evolve
Halo Nation will jumpstart the Halo information pages
Halo Fanfiction will give more content to modders and modding teams who need story content for their mods
The authors who are skilled at writing fiction can work directly on modding teams with the modders.
I'm also developing the Zeus Halo Map editor
Which is an online editor of halo .map files
http://zeus.blamdevcom.net/
The potential for this is multifarious, not simply a merger of communities.
Developers can continue to work on the Halo source code instead of going through Microsoft's finicky legal department.
Modders and Players can have indirect access to the source code and work with the developers directly
Microsoft makes money.
Modders make a little money.
It's a self-sustaining business model.
Everyone benefits.
I await your comments. I extend an invitation to participate. The sooner each community participates, the more say they can have in how the BDCN evolves.
Take it from another Halo community leader, great things can happen with this.
And now, a conclusive summary of events.
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I spent the last 7 days migrating three servers to another two servers, saving maybe $500 in the process. Effective consolidation, now adjusting and fixes in its wake.
The HDM wiki is going to remain locked until I can restart it from scratch and convert all the data to something we can use without further database corruption. By "convert", I basically mean copy-paste all the pages. Mediawiki stuff requires a whole lot of maintenance and the database sizes are much larger than necessary, in my estimation. For example, I would guestimate the MGM forum database to be 50 to 500MB in size, whereas even the Mod Database page by itself is like 14MB, and the entire HDM wiki which gets much less activity than MGM is over 300MB in size. My impression is that the wiki engine stores a lot more database information than is really necessary. A wiki is more effective in outlining details on how to accomplish a task than a forum is. If we could combine a forum and a wiki, I suppose that might be like an editable blog... but wikis have discussion pages also! I'm going to streamline and redo the halodemomods.com wiki so that it ties directly to the URL halodemomods.com. I am not concerned with the history of the pages and discussions beyond that which is displayed on each page. Therefore, the history of each wiki page will become moot and we'll start with a new premise for the process of uploading files. I'm still looking at options for how to handle the used files.
The HDM wiki is for discussions on how to mod the Halo games that use the Blam! Script Engine.
The Blam! Developer Communities Network is for consolidating all the Halo communities into one place so they can more effectively work together.
HaloMD is to provide the Halo Demo gamers and modders with a functioning version of Halo Demo (even though it modifies the work of MacSoft in their universal binary version of Halo Full).
MGM is a general Mac Gaming forum dealing specifically with modifying games. Basically, we study games like musicians study composer's scores, playing them and figuring them out. Some of us design standalone applications and some of us design web sites and most use these tools and others to analyze files and modify their contents to put forth mods at this forum.
The issue comes into play about file hosting and handling. MGM doesn't allow file hosting, and mediafire and filefront have not been useful to us in the past. BDCN will allow file uploading and analysis and modification using Zeus to mod the files and using another file upload system to publish them. So far, HDM has been a place to publish mods, but it needed too much maintenance because that was not what wikis were designed to do. The extensions used were icky and there were lots of problems overall, leading to my conclusion that now was the time to move forward to the next goal of working on combining the Halo communities.
Therefore, I invite all halo-related communities to combine into the Blam! Developer Communities Network, within the next few months. File hosting will be provided, everything will be free to those who are joining. You get an e-mail address at the domain name of your choice if the registrant of that domain name joins their web site with the BDCN, associating you with that particular community, like zapconquest@macgamingmods.com, monoman@bungie.net, sparky@halomaps.org, 002@halodemomods.com, nil@blamdevcom.net, whatever. If we unite as a single community, stuff like this is possible to do. We could do a lot more than this also, like consult directly with developers licensed to develop the Halo source code, form mod collaboration teams with other halo fan fiction story writers, have multi-modding sessions on Zeus -- and at some point soon, develop Halo to support in-game map editing to do much more than Forge can forge. Think in-game ui.map file editing and stuff like that... basically taking Zeus and slapping it into the Halo engine. Licensed developers can modify the game source code better than we modders can do it post-development.
We would be working together to develop Halo. This, my friends, is my vision for the start of the Galaxy Wars epic mod series.
I welcome all Halo community leaders to combine into the Blam! Developer Communities Network. If you are interested in doing so, contact me here:
sparky@blamdevcom.net
If you would like to discuss details, reply to this present topic.
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HaloDemoMods.com is migrating to the Blam! Developer Communities Network server.
For information about HaloDemoMods.com, what it used to be, see the "Old Information" quoted section below.
By moving HaloDemoMods.com to BlamDevCom.net, HDM can grow as part of the BDCN plan.
The Blam! Developer Communities Network is a business I have in the works which will unite the Halo communities, something I have seen as a goal for several years. Here are the general details about the current features in development:
- http://www.blamdevcom.net/ will be a consolidation of all the Halo communities, their assets and resources, discussions, information, etc.
- http://zeus.blamdevcom.net/ will be a singular online Halo map editor usable by every Halo community member
- The leaders of every Halo community web site will be able to migrate their content to the BlamDevCom server or refer their members to our web site in order to reduce or eliminate hosting costs for these sites and to integrate features like map uploading and map editing
- The players, modders, map and content authors, developers and publishers will be united as a single community
- The modders, map and content authors and developers will be able to work together on the Blam! Script source code with permission from Microsoft through the auspices of the Blam! Developer Community Network
- Modders and map makers will, if desired, be able to sell their maps and mods to players for $1 as a donation
- The HaloMD lobby script is being hosted by Monoman's server; the HaloMD update directory is hosted by BlamDevCom.net
- All members of BlamDevCom.net will get a free e-mail address @ their Halo web site of choice (HaloMaps.org, HaloDemoMods.com, BlamDevCom.net, MacGamingMods.com, etc.)
- All the Halo forums and web sites will be found in one location but will still be able to be accessed by their original domain names like HaloDemoMods.com and Halo.Wikia.com
- The role of HaloDemoMods.com will remain as a wiki, but will gradually become a singular resource for all things related to modding Halo maps --- but the hosted map files will be consolidated into a BlamDevComNet database along with all the map files from HaloMaps.org and other Halo web sites
- With access to the source code of the Halo game and united as a single community of fans, players, modders, map makers, asset developers, artists, storyline writers, game developers and publishers, we can expand the Halo epic together!
Discuss!
Old Information wrote: Halo Demo Mods
Halo Demo Mods is a partner website with MGM. It can be accessed via this address:
http://www.halodemomods.com
Right now, the primary function of HDM is as a wiki for all things useful to us. Please reply here with your ideas for how we can use this site.
Featured Subdirectories:
To use a subdirectory, type the name before ".halodemomods.com" - The "www." subdirectory sends you to the main directory, but it doesn't need to be used before a subdirectory. For example, to access the mod database, type in the URL mods.halodemomods.com, not www.mods.halodemomods.com.
wiki - Direct link to the wiki home page
mods - Mod Database
tools - Tools
tutorials - Tutorials
links - Halo Website Links
galleries - HDM Image Galleries
files - Uploaded Files
mail - Member E-mail
members - List of registered users
news - Recent Changes (the first stop for contributions)
stats - HDM Wiki Statistics
forum - this HDM topic where you are now
User Subdirectories:
To create your own unique subdirectory, request a free subdomain pointer using the link in the "Special Features" section below.
jacob - Jacob Nobuyuki's user page (MGM member info)
nil - Nil's user page (MGM member info)
sparky - Sparky's user page (MGM member info)
tokage - Tokage's user page (MGM member info)
xxxshooter - XXXShooter's user page (MGM member info)
Special Features:
Request a free subdomain pointer to your user page! - just leave me a note there and you can have a subdomain address such as "imthecoolest.halodemomods.com". Give your subdomain to friends in Halo Demo so they can quickly find your hosted mods.
Request a free e-mail address - Leave me a request to get your own free e-mail address @halodemomods.com! E-mail storage space is 50 MB per user.
Server Stats for 1/28/09 wrote: Account Usage
Disk quota (MB) - Current usage
6%: 2987.8/50000 MB
Bandwidth quota (MB) - Current usage
Starting 01/01/09 00:04:40
Ending 02/01/09 00:00:01
1% : 14817.98/1024000 MBServer Stats for 3/31/09 wrote: Account Usage
Disk quota (MB) - Current usage
13%: 6333.86/50000 MB
Bandwidth quota (MB) - Current usage
Starting 03/01/09 00:06:13
Ending 04/01/09 01:00:01
4%: 44037.45/1024000 MBHDM E-mail setup
If you have an e-mail address @halodemomods.com, you can set up your e-mail client with the following information:
http://helpdocs.westserver.net/v3/sitem ... E-mail.htm